>On a cold Saturday in December, in a Meatpacking District loft, loneliness was a common topic of conversation among the young women who attended the meeting of the Village Fairy Book Club. They agreed that New York, despite being a city of 8.5 million people, is a notoriously lonely place.
“It’s been so hit or miss meeting people here,” Lia Villaruz, 22, lamented about New York City over canned coffee drinks. After moving here earlier this year, Villaruz, who works at Pfizer, has struggled to find a solid community in the city. “I’ll meet nice people, we’ll hang out once, I’ll never see them ever again,” she said.
The difficulty of finding friends in New York was one of the main motivations behind the Village Fairy Book Club. Founded in July of 2023, Ellie McCoy’s and Isabella Harrison’s new book club for Gen-Z, “girls who read,” is gaining quick popularity. Their sold-out December meeting drew a crowd of about 120 post-college young women interested in connecting with new people over books. The popularity of the book club reflects a nationwide growth in reading among younger age groups since 2020.
Ellie McCoy, 23, who works at Dolce Vita doing wholesale, was looking for other readers when she moved to New York City from Florida almost two years ago. She had been interested in forming a book club in the past. McCoy met Isabella Harrison, 23, who works in influencer marketing, and they became fast friends, connecting through a passion for reading physical books.
“At the time, we were living two blocks away from each other,” Harrison said. “We were like, oh, we can make our own little community and have events around the neighborhood.” Their love for their neighborhood, the East Village, and their love for reading, combined to make the Village Fairy Book Club.
“It can be really hard to make friends in New York,” McCoy said. “We kind of thought this would be a cool way to bring people together in a productive way that’s not necessarily around spending tons of money.”
For one recent newcomer, the strategy has been effective. Amelia Vega, 19, recently moved to New York City to be a nanny for a family member. She has had a hard time meeting people her age. “I’m busy a lot, so it’s hard to meet young people and get around,” she said. “It’s really hard to find book clubs that have younger people. They’re usually like late twenties to thirties, so I thought I’d check this place out.”
Like most people at the event, Vega decided to try the Village Fairy Book Club after discovering it on TikTok. Harrison and McCoy were disappointed with the turnout for the club’s first meeting in July, so they decided to use Harrison’s skills from her day job and post on TikTok. After doing so, the club’s popularity shot up. In fact, it’s made such a splash that NBC News recently featured the Village Fairy in a story about the growth of reading among the younger generations.
McCoy believes that camaraderie is the big reason for the club’s popularity, saying, “After our first big meeting, once we had some people from TikTok and Instagram that found us, we realized that so much of the reason that people were there is, they love reading and they love that part of it, but they are there just because they want community in New York.”
Although the Village Fairy is a book club, Harrison and McCoy see the books as more of a jumping-off point, and the meetings as a social, rather than literary, event. They thought structuring the meetings this way would be more fun and create a better community. Apparently, there were a lot of young readers in New York just waiting for an opportunity like the Village Fairy.
At $20 per person, the monthly meetings of about 130 people usually sell out within a couple of days. “We’ve started to get to know the names of people who are buying the tickets immediately and are like repeat attendees,” Harrison said. “I love to see them making friends, and exchanging numbers, and creating group chats at the events, which is a lot of fun to see.”
The Village Fairy Book Club is a part of a nationwide resurgence in reading. Reading has seen a reported rise in popularity since 2020, partly because of the COVID-19 pandemic, and partly because of a TikTok subgroup, called BookTok, that has grown around reading. According to Publishers Weekly, sales of print adult fiction saw an 8.5 percent jump in sales in 2022, largely thanks to BookTok.
Dara Hyde, a literary agent at Hill Nadell Literary Agency in Los Angeles, recognizes the impact of BookTok, but is a bit skeptical of it. “There’s always something that makes people think that reading is cool again for a short time,” she said.
One of Hyde’s clients, Angie Cruz, has seen a moderate boost in success because of BookTok. Both of Cruz’s novels, “Dominicana” and “How Not To Drown In A Glass Of Water,” have been the subject of much positive discussion on BookTok.
“I know that, especially in the beginning of BookTok, how sort of genuine and emotional people’s responses were,” Hyde said. “I think [that] really moved people to want to pick up books that people had recommended.”
As someone who works in the publishing industry, Hyde is having difficulties with the unpredictability of the TikTok algorithm. “It’s not something that, data-wise, you can say, well, this kind of book works, or this is the way that you can use TikTok.”
Despite her apprehension, Hyde is willing to accept TikTok for what it is. “Publishing is looking for any way to sort of help people discover books. And if that means people are doing that on TikTok, then they’re happy for it.”
For McCoy and Harrison, TikTok is mostly a vehicle, not a priority, as they don’t focus much on the books BookTok recommends. “I would say [we] try to steer away from the really popular books like Emily Henry or Colleen Hoover,” Harrison said. “We like to highlight books that maybe people wouldn’t have read if they didn’t find it through us.”
This month, the meeting was centered on the book of essays “Stepping on the Blender & Other Times Life Gets Messy” by journalist Katherine Snow Smith. Smith attended December’s meeting, where she read some of her stories and answered questions about writing, as well as her journey into publishing. “I’ve enjoyed talking to a couple of y’all who said you got some thoughts, experiences, or perspectives out of it,” Smith said about the reaction to the book. “I think this is amazing, what these girls have done, and what you all have done. I mean, just coming out and meeting new people and walking into a place by yourself.”
Next, McCoy and Harrison are looking to expand the book club into areas that interest them and their members, such as fashion and lifestyle content. They are also hoping to add an online platform to Village Fairy so members can connect if they can’t attend meetings in person. The next meeting of the Village Fairy Book Club is scheduled for the end of January.